Author: devadmin

New fiction up! You’d think this one would be SF or horror, but it’s actually more of a gritty crime piece!

Like a lot of my fiction these days, it debuted on my Patreon which, with fewer than 50 backers, is feeling a little lonely. It’s only five bucks to get a fresh new story every month, while ten gets you access to a private Discord. I’d like to get up to a hundred followers by year’s end. Wanna help?

One piece of fiction that won’t show up on the Patreon, however, is Ninki Goes to the Arcane Academy, a novella in a brand-new fantasy setting. But, more on that presently…

About a year ago, I dusted off two very old stories and reworked them for the Patreon. (I did two because it didn’t feel fair to just do one when they were old.) So now, a year later, they roll out here for free. Isn’t that great? If you want to support that Patreon, by the way, it’s at https://www.patreon.com/GregStolze .

Cold Yesterday is a weird ghost story with too many feelings, and Domestic Situation is about how things go down when absolutely everyone thinks someone else has all the power. Check them out.

Also, don’t forget that you can now get a whole bunch of my stories printed and bound and mailed to you house. Amazing, right? It’s called I Dream of Insomnia.

A year ago, readers on my Patreon got the story of a man exploring an alternate Earth where the touch of man was unknown, because animals never evolved. He mainly goes there to let his dog do its business beyond the reach of pooper-scooper laws, because the gate into that uninhabited world is huge and being used as a Hail Mary attempt at climate disaster mitigation.

You can read Curselands here. I hope you like it.

Curselands, like everything in my fiction library, is free and under a Creative Commons license, and I’d like to take a moment to remind you how that’s possible when I have internet hosting and upkeep fees to pay, along with the sordid necessities of feeding and housing my aging flesh. I sell stuff through DriveThru and, by necessity, Amazon. But the bulk of my income was Kickstarters, and my last one failed.

This isn’t great news. What is good news is, Patreon has been pretty steady and reliable. So, like a sunflower pursuing bright Phoebus, or like Dillanger robbing banks because that’s where the money is, I’m pushing that venue.

https://www.patreon.com/GregStolze

There it is. For five bucks, you not only get a fresh new story every month–you support the system whereby stories flow downstream here and end up free for the world to read. I love doing that, and I don’t want to threaten to stop doing it, but I just read a story about how, when everyone takes advantage of a resource and nobody pays for it, it goes away. It was called Curselands.

The real coolness at the Patreon, of course, is the exclusive, high-end ten dollar a month tier. There you not only get access to the last year’s archive of stories, you get on a private Discord. It’s pretty fun and chill. So far, it’s the only place I’ve put up my mashups of Chick tract art with Chuck Tingle quotes. So if you want to see Chick Tingle art, so far that’s the only option unless you make your own, which I heartily encourage because it’s fun.

(The story I just posted there is Penitentiary Pool Boy, a soft sequel to After the Cops, only instead of a grizzled cop, it’s a freshly-hired corrections officer in a brave new world of carceral reform. It’s also a murder mystery!)

-G.

That’s right! The long awaited anthology of nineteen of my short works is now on Kickstarter and you can pledge for it at this very instant!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gregstolze/i-dream-of-insomnia/

Now, if you’re a longtime Stolze fan and follower, a lot of the work on that table of contents is going to look familiar, but this is your chance to get it in a bound, printed volume to look pretty on your self. Moreover, if there are gaps in your collection, this is your chance to fill it out on the cheap. Almost all my self-published work is available as add-ons for this project, so getting it through pledging counts that money towards the goal in a way that just purchasing it straight out doesn’t. But if that doesn’t persuade you, consider that the prices through the Kickstarter are lower. So you save money two ways, if that even seems possible in this crazy economy.

On top of all that, I’m using this as an opportunity to try, once again, to get the novella Ninki out online for everyone. If you’re interested and curious, here’s the link to the teaser.

But of course, we can’t hit the stretch goal if we don’t make the base, and we can’t make the base without more pledges. I only set this for two weeks, because in my experience more time doesn’t help much… so act now!

Thanks!

-G.

Some time ago, in the really bleak depths of COVID lockdown, a friend and editor tried to assemble a set of stories set in the HPL Cthulhu Mythos setting (or something like it) but with a hopeful and humanist vibe. When he approached me about it, my first thought was, “There’s no way to thread that needle,” but ultimately I came up with something that was only 90% hopeless, and its title is Chthon, Mold-Mother, and the Sky People. If you want the story of a shell-shocked lesbian and her ex-cop lover escorting a cultist across a post-apocalyptic cosmic horror America, this is the tale for you. It’s quite a bit like Ad Hoc in tone, if you remember that one.

Now, if you’re wondering how I can give away quality fiction of this length absolutely free, the answer is–it got paid for a year ago by the fine folks backing my Patreon. That’s right, if you back it for just five dollars a month, you can read these stories a year before they go free! Moreover, if you back at the ten dollar level, you get access to the archive of the last twelve months of stories. Right now, that means two short stories based on Unknown Armies, a teaser chapter from my not-even-announced-yet science fiction novel, surreal horror, occult horror, mythological horror, brand new stuff, stuff I wrote a decade ago but reworked, and a couple pieces of gnarly crime fiction. Think it over.

When I’m done here, I’m off to update the Patreon with SF about the dark, dystopian future of elder care. Never a dull moment!

It’s that lovely time of month again. I’ve uploaded a brand new story at my Patreon page, which means an old one from last year rolls out and lands here, free for everyone, thanks to those cool as hell funding heroes.

(If you like the stories here, hey, you know what to do. Or, if you don’t, click that link up there and pledge the cost of an order of chicken wings from a gas station to keep the guttering lamps of indie culture beaming.)

The new story here is Got There First, one of my first-contact stories. (Some day I’ll probably have enough for a whole book that’s just variations on that theme!) This one’s funny, but watch out for the sting in the tail.

As for the new story up at the Patreon, that one’s called Mick and the Love and provides a nice bookend to last month’s story, Gwynafra Needs A Love Potion. As you game fans know, the Mick Peltier stories share a setting with the game Unknown Armies, so this is that horror game’s take on using magick to create unnatural affection. It works about as well as you’d expect.

-G.

This is exactly what you expect from me, right? A light-hearted tale of a girl in love who pursues her goals with great determination, right up to the happily ever after?

What?

You don’t expect that?

Hm. Well, you might like it anyway. Here’s Gwynafra Needs a Love Potion.

Also, while I have your attention, maybe sign up for my mailing list. I’m getting covers together for books, and I’d hate for you to miss out when those become available. There’s a button right at the top of the home page, you can’t miss it.

If you’re anxious for more of my fiction right now of course, you can sign up for the Patreon. It just updated with a fun little tale called Mick and the Beef.

-G.

This sounds like it should be promoting a new streaming service that somehow costs listeners even more while giving artists even less, doesn’t it? But no, it’s a short story from yours truly – one I always thought would make a decent one-act play. You can read it right here, right now.

If you’d wanted to read it a year ago, you could have done that by subscribing to my Patreon. It’s wild times over there, lemme tell ya! For just $5 – less than the cost of corrupting a Supreme Court Justice! – you can read fresh new fiction from me every month. Moreover, for ten bucks, you get access to a pretty chill private Discord channel and the previous year of Patreon stories. It’s your best value, if you can’t afford the aforementioned political corruption.

-G.

First up, there’s a new story in the ol’ fiction library, and it’s some nasty crime stuff. So, the content warning for Freckles is, there’s torture, murder, and allusions to sexual crimes. If you want to skip out, it’s understandable, but all that darkness is in service of a story about corrupted justice systems and people who’ve had enough, which seems unfortunately relevant these days.

The other good news is, my next book for Termination Shock hit its funding goal on Kickstarter. it’s called Ships: How to Build and Blast Them and you can read all about it here. True confession here: There are only a couple days left on the project as I write this, and if I was better at marketing I would have announced it here earlier. But if you miss the funding, it’s coming up on Itch.io and DriveThru presently, and when it’s for sale I shall certainly promote it.

Other than that, I’ve got a new story up on the Patreon. You could wait a year and read it here for free, but this one’s actually kind of close to my heart. So if you sign up, for this month at least, you can read Granddad’s Mystery House.

Y’all know I love a first contact story, right? I feel a particular fondness for the bobblehead aliens in this story. They’re not creepy. Really, they’re not!

In other news, I’m getting ready to do another game Kickstarter. It’s been a while, right? It’s more TERMINATION SHOCK stuff, and if you’re not familiar with it, this is a great time to get on board. It’s a SF game of wild freedom and (like ARTS OF EARTH) dealing with aliens when you’re not 100% sure what their deal is. The Kickstarter’s coming soon. If you want to get an alert when it all kicks off, just click here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crankshaft/ships-a-supplement-on-spacecraft-for-termination-shock .

ARTS OF EARTH originally appeared a whole year ago on my Patreon, so if you want to see my stuff early, you can do so for as little as five dollars a month. Or you can just wait a whole year for the next twelve stories I’ve written. Your choice.